SuperGeekery

Mar 5

Lessons learned in ExpressionEngine add-on development

In January I released the first commercial add-on I’d developed for ExpressionEngine. It’s called Pic Puller and it helps an ExpressionEngine developer create and integrate an Instagram application into his or her site. This post isn’t meant to get you to go buy a copy of the Pic Puller add-on. (Granted, I won’t stop you either.) Rather, it’s a personal journal of my process of making it and what I’ve learned along the way. It may be a bit... + read on

Jan 11

Expression Engine 2 Plugin: Empty P Stripper

I’ve got a small little Expression Engine add on., but it might be helpful if you use Pixel and Tonic’s WYGWAM to give your client’s text entry into an Expression Engine textfield a little UX love. WYGWAM’s a good tool that I’ve used several times on sites. Clients find it an easy thing to pick up. For a recent build though, I kept noticing some strange spacing when my client was using it to create copy. There were empty P tag pairs scattered... + read on

Mar 5

A FaceTime Audio Bug?

I’m working on a simple video recorder with Flash and I was having a strange issue with audio, but I thought I’d post here about it since I didn’t find any other posts online about it. I have a MacPro and and Logitech QuickCam Vision Pro for Mac and I’m happy with it, although it doesn’t record hi def video like the box claims. (Logictech says this is because it relies on the Mac OSX drivers which don’t current support it, but I digress.) This... + read on

Dec 31

Where there’s a will, there’s a dial. A dial component for Flash.

For a recent Flash project at JMX2, I needed to have a dial for a user to turn and it would effect affect how many particles were generated by a particle generator. There wasn't a dial component in the standard Flash IDE, so I looked around online and although there seemed to be a couple Flex versions, I didn't find a Flash version. I needed to make one myself. A dial seems so simple but there's more going on there than you might guess. It... + read on

Dec 3

SuperGeekery Tagstripper Update - Dealing with HTML Special Characters

The Expression Engine add-on I wrote when I made SuperGeekery, SuperGeekery Tag Stripper, has had a small feature update. I've spoken to a few people who have been using the plug in for creating the meta data for their header tags. I think they've basically been taking a field from their content, maybe the summary field or the body field, and placing it in the header so search engines get an accurate view of what the page is about. The Tag... + read on

Sep 27

Why Isn’t OGG Video Playing in Firefox from Amazon S3? It might be all in your headers.

Let’s assume you’re trying to build a site with HTML5 video playback and you use Amazon S3. Good so far, right? Well, depending on how uploaded your video files to your Amazon S3 server, you might end up with video that won’t play back in Firefox. Actually, it’s not that it won’t load, it won’t even load and attempt to play. It has to do with the headers that are set of the file during their upload. I normally use Transmit, the wonderful FTP... + read on

Jul 19

iPad Review: Making fonts with iFontMaker

What do you think of my typeface? I named it SG Funny Face. I made it on my iPad and I want to give you a quick review of the iPad application I used to make it. Before I start, I also wanted to give you a copy of the font. Click here to visit the SG Funny Face page and download your own copy. It's free and you can use it however you want. The font creation app is called iFontMaker by The 2TTF. (Visit The 2TTf site or the application's page on... + read on

Mar 1

Expression Engine 2 Plugin: SuperGeekery Tag Stripper, version 1.0

Note: Since it's initial release, the SuperGeekery Tag Stripper has had a few minor updates. It is now at version 1.0.2. The links in the article download the most recent version. Eventually, I will write a proper standalone page for this addon including a real change log. The redesign of SuperGeekery coincided with the release of Expression Engine 2 which gave me the opportunity to jump into the latest version of EE on a project that I was the... + read on

Jan 12

Update On Building a Portfolio Site in Wordpress and the Plugins That Made It Work.

Back in October 2009, I wrote about research I was doing about building a portfolio site with Wordpress. (Read that post here.) That post was inspired a project we were talking about doing at JMX2 at that time. Several months have passed and we’ve built the site I was initially researching. It’s live and I’m happy to finally share it with you. Check out the new TRÜF Creative site at http://trufcreative.com. (Note to WordPress folks: This... + read on

Oct 29

Activating an Update Version of Windows 7 with a Fresh Installation

When Vista was released, I ended up getting 2 full copies of Vista Ultimate to install on my MacPro and my MacBook Pro. I use VMWare Fusion, although I’ve also used Parallels and recommend either to people who ask. When Windows 7 was available for pre-order, I bought 2 upgrade copies. I decided against getting another ‘Ultimate’ version though. I chose ‘Pro’ because it was all I needed. I’m not the first and I won’t be the last to say it either,... + read on